Thoughts on Popular Culture and Unpopular Culture by Jaime J. Weinman (email me)

Friday, July 27, 2007

Marx Mystery Solved

This is great. You know the scene in the Marx Brothers' A Night At the Opera where Groucho pretends to speak a foreign language to his brothers (and Allan Jones, in the Zeppo role)? It's often been explained that the sound people took English dialogue and played it backwards to make it sound like an obscure foreign language. But Mark Evanier asked his readers to reverse the reversed dialogue so we could hear what was actually being said. And they did it. There are no hidden messages or obscenities of any kind, alas, but still it's fun to hear.

2 comments:

While this is my "reversed" version of the scene here, we really have Mark Evanier to thank for initiating the idea. Yes, it's too bad Groucho and Co. didn't have the forethought to utter something obscene for us to discover seventy years later!